DUSTIN GUY DEFA’S “BAD FEVER”

Screening Times: Friday March 11th, 8:45pm (Alamo Lamar B), Monday March 14th 4:00pm (Alamo Ritz 2), Thursday March 17th, 3:00pm, (Rollins Theatre)

SXSW stalwarts Kentucker Audley and Eleonore Hendricks star in Bad Fever, the debut from Brooklyn-based newcomer Dustin Guy Defa about the wistful, misbegotten almost, but not quite love affair between a couple of drifters, one of whom seems to videotape everything she does with an antiquated video camera.

Filmmaker: How did you first conceive of Bad Fever?

Defa: I was in the middle of writing a different screenplay and working as a carousel operator. One night this couple got on the carousel, a middle-aged business-type and a young Asian woman. There was something lonely about them, something terrible and sad. I got an awful feeling that they didn’t know each other, not deep down, and that this was really some sort of make-believe role-playing moment. From there this idea snowballed about a man who can’t connect with people, who has trapped himself inside his own thoughts. I didn’t use the two people on the carousel as characters but they were the catalysts and pushed me into a theme, loneliness, which is a word a repeated to myself over and over again for the next two weeks. Then I started writing, and the writing came fast. At the beginning of the first draft, I came down with a horrible fever, and I thought of the title. I knew the title had nothing to do with my actual fever, it just sounded right. Bad Fever really means that feeling of loneliness that I was hoping to capture, this dreadful sense of desperation, wanting so much to find somebody who likes you. That desperation can turn a person into a someone completely different, it really is like a fever that can overtake somebody.

Filmmaker: Who was most instrumental in getting the film financed and produced?

Defa: I’m the producer on the film. I did most of the grunt work and financing. I’ve never done this before and so it was a big challenge and the … Read the rest

RODDY BOGAWA ON “TAKEN BY STORM”

Excuse the inconsistent audio levels, a few bad edits, and the boom-y sound of some of this, but I decided to simply take the recording of my interview with Roddy Bogawa about his new doc, Taken by Storm, and run it as an audio podcast. I may try and do some more, and if they get smooth enough, start uploading them to iTunes.

Taken by Storm is a portrait of artist Storm Thorgerson, who is best known for his work with the graphic design company Hipnosis designing album covers for bands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. His sometimes surreal images, often the products of giant, theatrical photo shoots, are instantly recognizable as the covers of such albums as Dark Side of the Moon, Animals, Wish you Were Here, Houses of the Holy, and the solo albums of Peter Gabriel.

When I heard that Bogawa, whose own work includes experimental features like Some Divine Wind; the “lo-fi science-fiction film” Junk; and an autobiographical underground punk documentary, I Was Born, But, made a movie about the guy who did Pink Floyd’s album covers, I assumed, frankly, that it was a commercial job and that the film was intended to be a bonus item on some ’70s rock box set. Once I started watching the film, however, I knew otherwise. This isn’t your standard rock-and-roll hagiography. It’s an insightful and often moving portrait of an artist later in life, a man who has found a space for his visions within the world of commercial album cover design instead of the high-art market. But while Bogawa’s film contains interview material from Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Nick Mason, and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, and plenty of footage of Thorgerson on location mounting his giant shoots, it also has thoughts and testimonials from art critics and fans like fellow artist Damian Hirst. And, in the film’s final notes, it muses on the relationship of art to music, what we lost when we went from twelve-inch album covers to tiny CD cases, and what will be nearly … Read the rest

“BETTER THIS WORLD” DIRECTORS KELLY DUANE DE LA VEGA & KATIE GALLOWAY

When two young activists from Midland Texas were arrested with Molotov cocktails at the 2008 Republican convention, their story became a media sensation, but documentarians Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega couldn’t escape the feeling that there was more to this story than the good-kids-turned-domestic-terrorists version the media was reporting. So, they did what any skilled documentarians do: they took a leap of faith, jumped a plane and started talking to people involved with the case. The result is Better This World, a documentary that explores what happens when idealistic, angry young activists stop being polite and start getting mixed up with the FBI. I spoke with Galloway and Duane de la Vega as they were putting the finishing touches on their film, just in time for its premiere at SXSW.

Filmmaker: How did you decide to pursue this particular story?

Galloway: I was just sitting on a plane, and I came upon this story about an FBI informant who was going to be the star witness in a case against two young men from Midland Texas who were caught building Molotov cocktails at the Republican convention in 2008 and charged with domestic terrorism… The defense in the case of David McKay was entrapment, and the question was whether they would have been doing this if there had not been this government agent. Kelly and I had been talking about working on something together, and when we got together with our stack of ideas, she said that  this one was the one. We got on a plane two days later and started filming on the eve of David McKay’s domestic trial.

Duane de la Vega: After reading the blurb, we decided to take a small financial gamble and go out there and interview all the characters and decide whether they were strong enough. Almost immediately after meeting them, we knew that the characters were strong, and the story got more and more complex. We felt confident after that first trip that there was a rich story we could tell.

Filmmaker: A lot of your other films were filmed in real … Read the rest

“GIRL WALKS INTO A BAR” DIRECTOR SEBASTIAN GUTIERREZ

Over the years film lovers have accused everything from sound to television of destroying the cinematic altar at which they worship. But rather than wallow in nostalgia for a time before this newfangled digital world, director Sebastian Gutierrez decided to take this streaming media thing out for a whirl to see what she could do. He developed his latest feature, Girl Walks Into a Bar, exclusively for web distribution. Sponsored by Lexus, it will be available in the YouTube Screening Room on the same day as its SXSW premiere. The best part of the whole free-on-the-internet thing? Well for Gutierrez, it’s that no one, including his friends and a certain journalist, have a decent excuse for not watching his movie come March 11th.

Filmmaker: How did you come up with the idea for this project?

Gutierrez: I was finishing another movie called Elektra Luxx. We were filming during the daytime, and I walked into this bar. I just thought wow, this bar would be a really great location because it is closed during the day. I started thinking about how every bar was different and how you could do an Atlmanesque movie like Short Cuts about all these different bars… At the same time, I sat down with these guys [and discussed] whether it was possible to make a movie for the internet. I thought yes, we could have a ten-act structure and be able to have the commercial breaks, which is what the internet seems to require.

Filmmaker: Films set in Los Angeles with an ensemble cast are practically a genre onto themselves. You already mentioned Short Cuts. Are there any others that inspired this project?

Gutierrez: Altman is only a structural reference to the ensemble nature of the story. The tone is more similar to Elmore Leonard. When you’re making a movie for very little money, character and dialogue become the main means to making that movie. It was basically like writing a play, writing ten-page scenes that can move the story. If actors were only available for a day or two, they could only be … Read the rest

SXFANTASTIC’S TIM LEAGUE ON 2011′S MIDNIGHT EDITION

Despite their protestations to the contrary, festival programmers are often a competitive bunch, jostling for not only premieres but status. That’s why SXFantastic, now in its third year, is such a welcome event. A collaboration between SXSW and Fantastic Fest, which unspools its own main event in September, SXFantastic brings Fantastic’s genre smarts and midnight-movie acumen to the South By sprawl. The result is a focused section that has been producing its own fan favorites, critical hits and even industry acquisitions. Last year’s successes included Gareth Edwards’ Monsters and the unlikely pick-up A Serbian Film (which just landed the SITGES festival in court over child pornography charges).

Comments Fantastic Fest co-founder Tim League, “Monsters — and what happened to Edwards after the festival — were our biggest surprises last year. It got picked up immediately, he’s got an agent, and now he’s helming the super-big-budget Godzilla reboot. And before SXSW he was pretty much an unknown SFX guy. I’m really happy for what happened to him.”

Of the origins of SXFantastic, League says, “I’ve always been a huge fan of SXSW. The opening day at the Alamo Draft House was for SXSW back in 1997, so we have had a relationship for a long time. When the Fantastic brand started to rise and we became known for our midnight program, [SXSW’s] Janet [Pierson] and I had a casual conversation about an alliance, and so far I’ve loved it. Off season, it allows me to keep looking under rocks and stay in touch with filmmakers, and I enjoy the process of programming just five movies instead of 70.”

So what about SXFantastic’s 2011 line-up? League calls Brandon and Jason Trost’s The FP (pictured above) “lovably unique,” saying, “I love its visual anarchy. The FP is set in some sort of strange alternate reality world where civic decisions are solved by a dance video game, Beat Beat Revolution. It’s played earnestly, but everyone speaks in a mid-’80s hip-hop-inspired dialect. And the film is a family affair. Brandon was the d.p. on Crank 2, which I love. His sister who was … Read the rest

JANET PIERSON ON THE FILMS — AND CROWDS — OF SXSW

Six weeks before the festival, every hotel room in downtown Austin was booked solid. Badges were already selling out a month prior, and, in the last few weeks, LAX-AUS flights have become almost impossible to come by. Last year the festival was, by all accounts, over-crowded — press and industry felt needlessly constrained by the impossibility of special access to screenings, and complaints of line cutting were all over Twitter. Pierson and her staff took all of these criticisms hard. In the wake of the grumblings, there are new and bigger theatres (the renovated State Theatre, next to the Paramount; the Vimeo theatre inside the convention center), new policies in place to cut down on cutting (sequential numbers will be distributed one hour before each screening) and methods to cheer up the industry (same-day Express tickets will be released each morning to badge holders.) But as the anecdotal evidence mounts, some anticipate the most crowded, least buyer-friendly atmosphere ever.
Has the new pressure from industry affected Pierson?

“We do feel that there’s more attention. We’ll see how it plays out, it’s tough — you want great things to happen for the films, because press coverage benefits everybody; agents and distributors and buyers should discover the films and give them futures and income. But we’re not a market, so we need to balance that.”

SXSW’s pride in not being a market — the desire to guarantee “democratic” screening environments for the films; to cater to the audience, not the industry — is complex. With premieres of films by Takashi Mike and Jodie Foster (The Beaver, which Pierson is proud to be showing, as it would have been swamped in tabloid frenzy anywhere else), the program needs to retain a balance between the audience favorites, press schedule relevance and emerging filmmaker discoveries.

“For me, being a destination festival is important, being a place that people bother to take a flight and book the hotel, that’s a goal; you want to experience this event in real time.” But the lack of press and industry perks is part of a larger mission … Read the rest

AARON KATZ’S “COLD WEATHER”|
By Scott Macaulay

The group of filmmakers dubbed “mumblecore” is known for many things, but visual resplendency is not one of them. In fact, some of the movement’s biggest names proudly announce their disinterest in design, careful framing, and the dramatic effects of controlled lighting. From the outset, however, Aaron Katz has been an exception. Even when operating on the tiniest of budgets — as he did when shooting Quiet City for $2,000 — he has paid careful attention to the expressive potential of his characters’ surroundings. The nighttime industrial Brooklyn streets of Quiet City are not the harsh jungle of much urban storytelling but instead a poetically rendered space for an irony-free examination of chance encounters and possible romance.

If the pleasurable prettiness of Quiet City snuck up on you, that’s not the case with Katz’s latest, Cold Weather. Gorgeously shot in deliberate compositions by Andrew Reed on the RED camera, Cold Weather finds Katz working his Portland, Oregon locations for all they are worth. This time, however, it’s the story that sneaks up on you. Cold Weather is about a directionless young twentysomething, Doug (Cris Lankenau), who moves in with his sister (Trieste Kelly Dunn) after abandoning plans to become a scientist. He begs her to accompany him on day trips, reads detective novels and, finally gets a job at an ice factory. Up until this point, about 30 minutes in, Cold Weather is pleasant and diverting character study of a man grappling with that uncertain post-college, pre-adult time of life in uncommonly beautiful surroundings. Narrative intrudes when Doug meets a visiting ex-girlfriend (Robyn Rikoon), who soon goes missing. Partnering with his sister and a co-worker (Raul Castillo), Doug becomes a kind of Millenial gumshoe, tracking her down while slipping into the role of his fictional detective hero, Sherlock Holmes. In doing so he finds not only a sense of purpose but also the self-image that allows him to connect again with his sister.

Sliding from character study to offbeat comedy to the kind of casual anti-mystery made by Wayne Wang (Chan is Missing), Jim Jarmusch and, in … Read the rest

CAMERON YATES’ “THE CANAL STREET MADAM”|
By Alicia Van Couvering

What’s it like to get out of jail and try to rebuild your life when that life was running a hugely successful brothel in the middle of New Orleans and the Lifetime movie of your experience is about to air? Cameron Yates’ new documentary, The Canal Street Madam, asks that question of Jeanette Maier and generates even more questions than answers. Was Maier a dangerous criminal, transporting women across state lines for the purposes of her own profit and their vicitimization as sex workers, or was she herself the victim of a hypocritical system that convicted and exposed her but protected the male clientele?

As the Lifetime movie, starring Annabella Sciora and Dominique Swain, makes clear, this was a three-generation affair; both Maier’s mother and daughter were involved. Her prostitution began as a way to support her three children and grew into the brothel that she thought was making their dreams come true — lavish Christmas gifts, a nice house. But when her daughter became a teenager, she insisted on joining the family business; Maier decided to let that happen under the roof of her own business (to avoid watching her daughter walk the streets with no supervision). Likewise, the son she showered with gifts as a baby would turn to drug abuse and crime in her absence.

Yates started out simply wanting to make a “humanistic portrait of a sex worker,” but the film turned into much more than that. Maier insists that prostitution should be legal, and she has become a popular figurehead for that movement. She is wild, shrewd, intense, generous, manipulative, loyal, self-aggrandizing, incredibly sad and incredibly funny. The Canal Street Madam is a portrait of a very complicated woman living a very complicated life, but its humanity is as simple as Jeanette’s will to survive.

Filmmaker: How did you meet Jeanette?

Cameron Yates: I was in New Orleans over the summer, and I read about the — it was just about the time that she was going to serve her time in the halfway house, after she had been busted. I believe I contacted … Read the rest

GEOFF MARSLETT’S “MARS”|
By Alicia Van Couvering

Geoff Marslett’s Mars is a whimsical rotoscoped space exploration romance starring Mark Duplass, the kind of film whose possible existence may never have occurred to you, but one that you are very glad to have discovered. Marslett, an Austin native and much-lauded teacher of animation at UT Austin, studied mathematics, philosophy, art, science and languages before arriving in Texas to get his degree in narrative filmmaking. Gradually, he began to get interested in animation, taught himself the process and started inventing new techniques for his short films, now numbering over a dozen. Monkey vs. Robot, for instance, has screened at over 25 festivals and on HBO and PBS.

Mars is set in an imagined future when we’ve developed the ability to send astronauts to Mars and communicate with them via video conference, but have adopted a style of clothing and hair reminiscent of what people imagined space looked like in the 1980’s. Zoe Simpson plays Dr. Casey Cook, a gorgeous type-A lead astronaut, partnered with Paul Gordon (who also directed and stars in The Happy Poet), and Mark Duplass (Humpday, The Puffy Chair) is the renegade third astronaut Charlie Brownsville, who discovers at take-off that he was brought along merely as contingency. But as the trio near space, it is Gordon’s character who becomes the third wheel, as Casey Cook and Charlie Brownsville’s flirtation takes off. There’s a certain laid-back Austin vibe to the performances, which is coupled with a vibrant, bouncing image that looks, as Marslett wanted it to, like “a combination between a graphic novel and a hand-drawn photograph.”

Marslett was one of our “25 New Faces of Independent Film” this year and Mars premiered at SXSW this week.

Filmmaker: Is it accurate to describe this as a Rotoscope film?

Geoff Marslett: It’s hard to classify – if people ask me outright to describe the movie I’d say, “Yes, it is a rotoscoped animated film,” but technically it’s a combination of a lot of different animation and processing effects together. I tried to invent a unique visual approach. When I set out to … Read the rest

MATT McCORMICK’S’ “SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS”|
By Scott Macaulay

Matt McCormick may be premiering his first feature here in Austin this week, but he has long been a major figure within the Pacific Northwest’s independent film scene. For over 15 years he has made work that is both experimental and humorous, formally challenging and beguilingly poetic. His 2002 film, The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal, is something of a short-film masterpiece, a wildly clever riff on art criticism that is also an ode to changing face of the modern city. In addition to his film work, which he presents in film venues but also bars and rock clubs, McCormick has run a film festival (PDX) as well as an experimental film and video distribution label, Peripheral Produce, that has released on DVD work by fellow artists like Miranda July, Bill Brown, Sam Green and Naomi Uman. And, he does music videos for bands like The Shins.

Needless to say, then, a lot of fans have been awaiting McCormick’s foray into feature filmmaking. Some Days are Better than Others is that debut picture, and perhaps what struck me the most about it is its quiet confidence. McCormick has resisted easy jokes, satirical jabs, or surface-level ironies, instead investing in his characters real warmth and compassion. The film follows four characters whose stories echo and reinforce each other. Carrie Brownstein of the band Sleater-Kinney plays Katrina, a would-be reality TV show contestant who works days at an animal shelter while trying to incorporate the pain of a recent break-up in her homemade audition tapes. James Mercer of the band The Shins plays a directionless slacker who just hopes to land a production assistant job so he can pay his rent. He checks in on an elderly friend and widower, played by David Wodehouse, who is making an experimental science film about soap bubbles. And Renee Roman Nose plays a severely withdrawn Salvation Army worker trying to reconnect a discarded urn containing the remains of a young girl with its owner.

McCormick’s structure of vignettes and interconnecting storylines may recall for some viewers films by Todd Solondz or Miranda July, but … Read the rest